Tag Archives: #Plato

Reflections on the education system from a retired teacher (or more accurately its failings)

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One of the occupational hazards of being a teacher is disillusionment. The disillusionment that I experienced was something dating from the last years of my teaching career, I began to question the value of what I was doing. Teaching A level sociology was increasingly about cramming as much of the course content as possible into two short years. At best I was giving them an insight into the society in which they lived, but at worst to my teaching threatened to turn into a recitation of the facts, as were required by the exam system. Neglect of the latter would have meant, I and they would be judged failures.

English education as I experienced it can be described as ‘throwing as much information as possible at the student hoping that some of it sticks’. Quantity is confused with quality. I am a committed supporter of slow education. There has to be another way of delivering education, a way of teaching that ensures the student develops an understanding of the subject. Not that this is something new and revolutionary. When I was undertaking teacher training in the early 1970’s ‘patch teaching’ of history was in vogue. Rather than a liner course that was literally a run through of world history. Focus would be instead on particular patches of history in depth. In that way they would develop an in depth understanding of the subject. Michael Gove disliked this method of teaching and returned to subject to a history of great Britons. What I am advocating is not new, this is the discovery approach to learning advocated in the Plowden Report 1967 and Rousseau’s ‘Emile’ 1763 and Plato’s ‘Meno’ 4BCE. Education that takes the child as it’s starting point, rather than the subject, as is now the favoured approach.

I can cite Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott as part of my evidence to demonstrate the superiority of slow over quick education. Education he said should be the initiation of the student into new areas of experience. What he meant was that students should be inducted into a new of thinking or understanding. He believed subjects such as history had a distinct identity or essence. Only through an i immersion into a subject area would enable the student to grasp its essence. Although he did not state it as such, he was an advocate of a liberal education. A good education would involve the student being initiated into a number of distinct but overlapping educational experiences. Quick fire education of the type so popular in England will not give students the experience of education that Michael Oakshott wanted for them.

Recent changes to the national education curriculum have put limits on what is taught or certain subjects off limits. Universities have been discouraged from offering modern languages on the dubious basis that they are not self financing. Not the approach to education envisaged by this most conservative of philosophers.

Nietzsche’s criticisms of German grammar schools in the 19th century are worth considering as they add to the understanding of what bad education might be. These schools all taught the same set of facts or understandings with which there teachers had been rehearsed in at institutes of higher learning. Nothing too challenging for the students or teachers was taught in these schools. German education was focused on teaching conformity. Round pegs for round holes, no difficult square pegs. They produced generation after generation of unthinking intellectual sheep, the untermensch.

Contemporary English education would earn Nietszche’s strictures. It is a system that seeks to discourage intellectual curiosity and the love of learning. The real villain of the piece is the English exam system. A system that values mediocrity. When doing supply teaching I taught Macbeth through the use of a comic book. Macbeth can be reduced to an exciting story, but was taught is not Shakespeare’s Macbeth. English Standard Attainment Tests required that all English students demonstrated a knowledge of Shakespeare, the greatest of all English playwrights. Given that it was a test to be undertaken by all fourteen year olds it had to be rendered in a form all could understand. The comic book had the advantage of providing students a number of simple facts that could be easily learnt and memorised for an exam in which students demonstrated there knowledge of Shakespeare. Whatever was being taught was not Shakespeare. Not only facts but the demonstration of government preferred writing formats were required to pass the SAT’s. Government diktat is stifling in students in any love they may have for this most creative of subjects. It is not surprising that having done their best to destroy a love of the English language and literature, there has been a marked fall in the number of students studying this subject at university.

The real villain of the piece is the exam system, it forces the education curriculum into a learning straight jacket. Creativity or going beyond the limits as specified by the minister earns no points from the education ministry and as it was not in their curriculum it can lead to a downgrading of a school. Too much creativity or pupil enlightenment can lead to the imposition of sanctions by the ministry.

When teaching economics in the 1970s, I used to teach my students about the command economy in the Soviet Union. It was not on the curriculum, but I then had the freedom to go off course with my teaching. The interesting thing is that then the government in Moscow tried to set the direction in which the economy moved, it did so through setting out global or quantitive targets for each sector of the economy. To ensure that central directives were met they had the KGB who would sanction those politicians managers who failed to fulfil their quotas. Sanction being a spell in a labour camp. Consequently local politicians and factory managers conspired together to give the appearance of meeting their targets. If the target for shoe production could only be met by producing left handed shoes (productivity increased if all workers made exactly the same product) that is what had to be done. All politicians up to the level of the capital city were in on the act, as failure to comply with centrally set targets meant a spell in the labour camp.

I feel the current education system in the way it is administered threatens to produce the equivalent of left handed shoes in education. Nick Gibbs the education minister insisted that a rigorous grammar component was added to primary school curriculum. He was little more qualified to write a course in grammar, that the Moscow politician was to direct the production of shoes in the distant Urals. Educationalists have accused this man of making up principles of grammar to teach students. One such make up grammar was the adverbial. A term unknown to grammar specialists at university and certainly to teachers.

Ministers of education have found setting of quantitive targets, such as demanding that a certain percentage of students to get a particular level in the SATs, is the ideal way to control the how and what of teaching in schools. From my reading of educational practice and philosophy, never did I ever come across ease of central control of schools as an objective.

The dead hand of exams is choking the life out of the education system. Politicians boast of the rigour of the English exam system. Every year steps are taken by ministers to ensure that only a small intellectual elite are awarded the best grades. A levels are the gold standard of education. What they never admit is that public exams are designed to make the majority fail. Only an A grade qualifies you for entry to the elite universities. Despite being called passes, grade B or less are in reality fail grades. I cannot see any merit in an education system that is designed to make the majority fail. This is the moral rottenness at the heart of the English educational system.

Grading students from A to E, 8 to 1 or from a First to a pass degree is not part of education. It’s a sorting system for employment or higher education. It’s main purpose is to make life easier for admissions tutors at university or employers. Unfortunately contemporary society insists on school and universities sorting students into various categories of person, so schools and universities cannot escape there sorting role. The only solution is to relegate this sorting function to a minor role in the curriculum, so ensuring that education takes the central place in the school or university curriculum.

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Why the economic crash of 2008 will not be the last such financial crash.

Economics, Philosophy, Politics, , , , , ,

As an economist I know of several explanations of why economies experience sudden and unexpected down turns, the usual explanation is the bursting of a credit bubble as happened in 2008. These downturns or crashes are always claimed by our political leaders to be unpredictable events, once in a life time happenings, even an ‘act of God’. Even when as in 2008 when the crash was caused by both human folly and greed. This misunderstanding is only possible because politicians have never understood the economics associated with John Maynard Keynes. He stated that economies are inherently unstable and these sudden and unexpected collapses in economic activity are part of of natural economic cycle. Unfortunately politicians act as if the good times will continue forever, a dangerous self delusion.

Although an economist by education, I am a philosopher by interest. Unlike Keynes I want use the techniques employed by the Greek philosopher Plato to explain the instability of the economy. He used myth to explain those aspects of reality that were not easily given to rational explanation, myth could make understandable, what reason could not easily explain. Perhaps the myth of the cave is the best known. A myth he uses to explain the ignorance of mankind as to the true nature of reality. He says imagine mankind as a group of individuals chained up in a cave. These chains prevent them moving and force them to look in one way only forwards.. In front of these men is a wall behind which is a fire. Now behind that wall images of things are passed backwards and forwards, so all the chained men see is a series shadows, which they take to be reality. Mankind for Plato could only see the world of appearances, which obscured the true nature of reality. However as I’m a 21st century economist who does not believe in myth, I will use metaphor as a substitute for myth.

The economy can be seen as a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces seem to fit together to form a picture,. It’s seems to be composed of a series of interlocking pieces that fit together to form an integrated whole. However closer inspection of the puzzle reveals that the pieces do not fit easily together. There are gaps between the pieces they don’t easily fit together. Now if the tray on which the pieces are resting is moved, the puzzle immediately begins to lose shape and the picture eventually disappears from sight. The economy can be seen as a badly formed jigsaw puzzle that is likely to falling apart at any disturbance. Politicians ignorant of economics constantly make foolish decisions, that disturb and disrupt the economic policy. Occasionally they make disastrous decisions that cause the economic puzzle to fall apart,

There have been in our recent history a series of such foolish policy making from our political leaders. The most common fallacious policy is to promote speculative boom in either the property or stock markets as the main driver of economic activity. It is the fools gold of a policy. If economic growth is dependent on a constant inflation in house and property prices, there will be a time when market confidence fails and asset prices collapse and with it the economy. Unfortunately this simple understanding of the economy is beyond the political classes. Politicians seem predisposed to believe that everything in the garden is rosy and nothing bad will occur. A recognition of the fragility on which economic well being is based is too disturbing and unsettling to be accepted as a truth by our blindly optimist politicians.

The jigsaw metaphor can be used to explain how policies should be made to fix an economy, once a downturn has occurred. The broken puzzle can be put together through decisive political action and the economy rebuilt. There might have to be some reshaping of the pieces to make them fit together better, so making the economy more resilient to future shocks. Obviously the one piece that needs to be reshaped is the property and financial markets. Action needs to be taken to limit the activity of speculators in each. This action is a system credit controls and taxation that chokes off any foolish speculative activities. Unfortunately the politicians seem to believe that remaking the economy is an impossible task. What they prefer is the maladroit tinkering that is called Neo-Liberalism or leaving the market to fix itself. This is akin to asking these malformed pieces that remake up the economic puzzle in their own image. As a consequence the speculative economy that caused the collapse of 2008, has been rebuilt by the dominant players in the market, bankers and financiers with minimal interference from the government.

I must confess to one failing which is typical of all economists, I find it much easier to explain why economies go wrong than why they go right. My jigsaw metaphor cannot explain why the economy is subject to exuberant and unexpected periods of rapid economic growth. Perhaps if economists such as I could explain this economic fact, the economy would be in a better position than it is now.

Ugly economics an explanation of why we are in a mess

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Plato developed the theory of forms which stated that all the virtues such as good and beauty were but mere copies of their ideal forms that existed beyond the sphere of life inhabited by humanity. In Plato’s creation myth the demigod who creates mankind makes mankind from the only material available, clay. A being made up of inferior materials unlike the Gods could never see the virtues in their true forms and would never able to appreciate true Good or Beauty. These inferior beings could only apprehend what were in effect rough and ready copies of the true virtues. Men could only know an approximation of the virtues. Although Plato was writing two thousand years ago his theory of the forms describes accurately the state of current economic knowledge, it is but a very imperfect copy of what might constitute true economics.

When I read economics what is striking is the lack of beauty in the subject, unlike for example physics there is no beauty in its formulations. Physics reveals the beauty of the universe, whereas all economics does is to reveal the ugliness of human society. The words of Gordon Gecko that ‘greed is good’ can be taken as the principle from which all current economic analysis derives. Our current Chancellor of the Exchequer believes that rewarding greed through  tax cuts for the wealthy is good, whereas helping the poor through welfare payments is bad, as it merely rewards a group of losers who are deprived of the incentive (compulsion) to work to provide for themselves and their families.

As a NeoPlatonist I recognise that although all the human sciences cannot be one or another form of moral philosophy; I do believe that a good social science should be informed by at least some of the virtues. Whenever I read an economic text it is very rare that I am grabbed by the beauty of the writing. All too often it is a struggle to get through some poorly written text.  A text that is peppered with difficult to understand economic terms, words that disguise the emptiness of the written text.  I believe that a text that is ugly in its construction can only create something that is ugly.

Good writing is that which contains understanding of beauty and as such moves the reader bad or ugly writing lacks any of the other virtues and as such has lost  touch with humanity. The government by constantly referencing ugly economics to justify all forms of unpleasant policy measures. One of the hidden scandals is the number of disabled and ill people who have succumbed to sudden death, as a consequence of sudden and unexpected benefit cuts. There are those ill and disabled who have resorted to suicide in consequence of the sudden loss of the income on which they depend.  Normally in such situations policy measures that have caused death would produce some contrition within political classes. The harsh welfare polices of the past few years have produced no such reaction. Instead ugly economics gives the justification to such measures, as what counts is the effectiveness of the whip that compels people to work. Government policy seems to a perverted inversion of Plato’s theory of forms. The supreme good is the balanced budget and subordinate policies such as welfare cuts are intended to make possible the attainment of this supreme goal. If this is the supreme good of human society it must be a very poor or mediocre society that sees this as its supreme good, a society which has rejected any sense of the grand vision that society’s of the past embodied. Athen’s with the construction of the Parthenon is one example of the grandeur of the human vision, contemporary Britain in which the only large constructions are shopping centres or malls sense to represent the very rejection of the grandeur that is humanity.

If Britain is to be judged by it’s leaders it is a nasty society bereft of any of the virtues that make a great society. A society which uses hunger as a scourge to make the poor work lacks any of the virtues that make a great society. All it’s leading politicians are like Socrate’s Alcibiades, a physically beautiful young man in appearance but in an inversion the Silenus dolls were ugly only on the inside he was ugly on the inside. Physical beauty concealed an ugly soul. It is not a true demonstration of the ugly society that politicians take great pains over their appearance, maintaining their youthful image through jogging or other forms of exercise and cosmetic surgery, What matters is their image, how they appear on the media. All our leaders tend to exhibit that fatal Alcibiades trait, beautiful on the outside ugly on the inside.

Perhaps it is being too unfair to blame the proponents of ugly economics for the mess that we are in. Could it not be equally possible that it is the ugly society which has created an ugly economics to match its essential ugliness. If economists are merely responding to the demand from the major power holders in society for a theory to justify their existence, they are culpable of devising a message that enables the ugly society to thrive. Their privileged role as the sanctioned intelligentsia serve to suppress any alternative voices. They are like the garden weed that denies those food plants we desire the space in which to grow and thrive.

A Surfeit of reform – the mess that is the British Education System

Economics, Education, Philosophy, Politics, , , , , , ,

My understanding of economics is derived from scepticism, the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus and Nietzsche when at his most lucid. The sceptic knows that nothing is true that there is no certainty in human knowledge. What ever the answer posed to a problem at the best it is but a partial answer. Sextus Empiricus was sceptical of human knowledge that he thought it best society continue in the same old tested and proven ways, as given the limitations of human knowledge any reforms proposed by the philosophers would inevitably worsen the human condition. This is illustrated by the probable apophrical story about Plato. Dion the tyrant of Syracuse invited the philosopher Plato to advise on improving Syracuse  society. His reforms proved to be totally impractical and caused nothing but discontent among the people so much so  that an angry Dion ending up selling Plato into slavery. However I would not go as far in my scepticism as Sextus as society is constantly changing and keeping things in the time honoured way is impossible. However a sceptic such as myself knows that all the grand theories of economics are untrue, they only contain at the best only partial truths.

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Syracuse, Sicily

Economists have observed that if a good is in short supply its price rises so encourages producers to produce more in the expectation of increasing their income. This is an indisputable truth but the free market theorists develop this further claiming that changes in price  will cause the market to move into an equilibrium where supply equals demand. It is this last statement that as a sceptic I would contest. There is no evidence that markets ever move into a state of equilibrium, as demonstrated by the housing market where demand has exceeded supply for decades. All that can be said is that market theory which states that price is the means through which supply and demand are brought into equilibrium is unproven.

There is one good example of the Plato school of economics in action and that is the mess that is the British education system. Concern was expressed in our governing circles about the poor quality of the British schooling system in the 1980s. A model for reform was found in public choice theory which is the application of market principles to public services. The local covered market in my city in which there are competing fruit and vegetable stall holders is a good example to explain the purposes of the reform. If one stall holder in the market sells produce that is of a poor quality or too high a price, they will lose sales to their rivals. Consequently competition between stallholders ensures that only good quality produce is sold at he lowest prices. Reforming politicians decided that the system that worked so well in the market would work well if introduced into the provision of public services. All that had to be done was to convert schools into the equivalent of competing fruit and vegetable store holders. Legislation was passed to achieve this and now there are a variety of competing state schools, academies, technical colleges and free schools to name but a few.

However this new market system of education has one huge flaw. There is no central co-ordinating authority to ensure that supply of school places matches the demand for school places. The problem that arises is that it is impossible to organise all these independent competing school to provide the number of school places needed. All the government can do is to encourage or cajole these competing schools into providing the required number of school places. However each school is responsible for its own finances and is not invest in providing the facilities for extra students unless they can be sure the places will be filled. They will respond after the event when there are a surplus of children unable to get into schools, once it is obvious that there is a need for places the school will respond. However there is one other caveat it takes time to create additional school places, it will require investment in buildings and new teaching staff and the consequence is that there will always be a time lag between demand for school places and the provision of those places. Leaving school provision to a market comprising several independent competing schools only ensures that demand will never match supply, so the provision of schooling for each child takes second place to preserving the integrity of the market, though a policy of non interference.

What I would say as a sceptical economist is that what is a proven truth in one sector of the economy cannot be easily or effectively transposed into another different sector, which may effectively run better on different principles. The free market principle of herding cats is not the best principle on which to organise the provision of school places and schooling in general.

Unfortunately the belief in the beneficial effects of the free market is so deeply imbedded in the political culture of the country that even the free market reforms produce some obviously dysfunctional results they are ignored.

Religious mysticism and economics

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Javanese Mystical Beliefs The New York Times

All my adult life I have been trying to come to terms with what I learnt in my undergraduate philosophy classes. Coming from a relatively isolated rural Anglican background I had a belief in moral absolutes such as good and truth. Such terms where regularly used in conversation in my rural community, local villains were known as such and there was no ambiguity in our moral understandings. However at university I was introduced to a critical philosophy that undermined my belief in moral absolutes. One such example were the writings of Gilbert Ryle in which he dismissed the concept of a moral good. Good he explained was a term incapable of definition, as people would give differing explanations of what good meant, therefore could could be no more than an emotion. The same philosopher dismissed human consciousness as the ‘ghost in the machine’. He was sceptical of the notion of a special quality called consciousness existing apart from the biological mechanisms, which produced emotions and feelings. The idea of self was suspect, it did not fit with the understanding that biologists had of the human being. Consciousness and self were unscientific, their existence could not be proved, so it was illogical to believe in them. I guess I like many students felt the moral tectonic plates shift beneath my feet and realised the moral truths in which I believed had no firm foundation. Using the biblical analogy I was living in a house built on the shifting sands of contemporary morality.

However these relativist philosophers had not abandoned any notion of moral good. In practice they saw good as having some functional value, they behaved as would good men and women. They were fair in their treatment of us, turned up regularly to lectures etc. If they had behaved immorally the whole system would have collapsed. The first lesson I absorbed as that even if they did not see good and truth as moral absolutes, they saw them as having a practical utility.

I never really abandoned my Anglican beliefs, although I ceased to be a practising one. The 1960’s and 1970’s were an age of secularism and I used to enjoy discomforting my friends by telling them I was a Christian. Christians were for them a kind of pre-modern being, who were as distant from modern man, as were the Neanderthals from Homo Sapiens. Intelligent people for them could not believe in the myths and fairy stories of which organised religion was composed.

What I have sought since my university days is some intellectual underpinning or substance for my pre-modern beliefs in good and bad. I could not accept that there only purpose was that of enabling men to live together in an organised society. Interestingly I did learnt of one community in the Pacific, where stealing and dishonesty were valued. However this particular community, because of its dysfunctional nature was dying out.

Obviously I read widely, there is probably not a major philosopher of whom I do not have some knowledge, but it was not until I studied theology as a postgraduate that I began to make progress in finding solid ground on which to found my beliefs. The answer lies in the paradoxical nature of the unknown God, whose is both unknown and known. All theologians are to some degree negative theologians, they admit God is beyond human understanding, yet they claim some knowledge of this unknown God. Bertrand Russell scoffed at these theologians who believed in an unknown God as he pointed out that it was absurd to claim belief in a being that had no existence. However he misunderstood what theologians mean when they say they have no knowledge of God. God is unknown because he cannot be known through the usual methods of human understanding, as he exists beyond human existence. There can be no book of God as it is impossible to describe or explain what God is in language. There can be no science of religion, the science of observation or the laws of cause and effect have no relevance to the study of God. Yet this God can be known to the individual, but not through the usual means of human understanding.

Knowing God is a peculiarly individual experience, it is not as Kierkegaard states something that can be picked up from an afternoon’s study. There are no texts of instruction as such or a required reading list. Following Kierkegaard we cannot use direct language to speak of God, he cannot be described, but instead the language of God must be indirect language. The great religious teachers of the past are largely ignored but to learn the way to knowing truth or God it is to them that one must turn. It’s a knowledge quite unlike the knowledge of science or the humanities. Indirect learning or knowledge is the means of accessing these higher truth. The twentieth century philosopher Jasper explains that myth is one very successful way in which these truths can be accessed. Probably he’s thinking of Plato’s myth of the cave, in which he compares humanity to a group of men chained in a cave facing a wall behind which is a fire. Behind that wall are passed images which cast shadows of the cave wall and the chained men believe that those shadow images are reality. When one of the chained men escapes and goes into the sunlight and returns to tell the chained men what he has seen they refuse to believe him; they prefer the shadows or appearances with which they are familiar. What Plato is demonstrating is that the knowledge for understanding everyday existence is inadequate for the task of understanding what he and his Islamic successors (Sufis) would term the real. Plato has another a myth that explains the link between the real and the world of appearances in which we live. The creator God fashions the world and humanity out of clay and he uses as his model for creation the ‘real’. We are but copies of what the creator God could see, but which are concealed to us. Plato never believed the myths he created were ‘real’ but they was the only way he could explain, the complex nature of reality and existence. Jaspers put it more succinctly, there are some truths that can only be told through the use of myths.

Plato’s separation of the world into two spheres that of appearance and reality has remained influential. It is an understanding of existence that has been developed within the religious traditions of both Christianity and Islam. Rather than myth the Sufi sages use poetry, metaphor being a substitute for myth. One of my favourite phrases is taken from Rumi’s poem ‘The North Wind’

‘No matter how hard you stare into muddy water
you will not see the moon or sun’

It’s one of the best summaries of the Platonic need to search for truth beyond the world of ‘appearances’. However describing this world as one of ‘appearances’ does contradict our understanding of reality. Doctor Johnson gave the best retort, when he criticised Bishop Berkley’s theology, which saw the world as a product of God’s imagining. He said the pain he felt when stone he knocked his foot against was all too real, and was not a product of somebody’s imagining. All I can say is that Plato was trying to describe a level of reality that as it was not immediately visible and it could be distinguished from a reality that was all too apparent, which appears to us.

A person such as myself is described as a mystic, a term which I feel is derogatory as I believe my approach to knowing truth is quite rational. There is however a good reason for writing about my understanding of mysticism as a economist. Mysticism gives a very different understanding of the world to that of a practitioner of a science of the world of appearances. Economics judges the world in quantitive terms, using terms such as cost, loss and profit; it has no place for values. Therefore its practitioners are capable of making the most inhumane decisions, as they lack any sense of value. Milton Friedman could approve the torture and killing of trade unionists because their destruction paved the way to the free market. Ian Duncan Smith the minister for welfare can pursue a policy that through the removal of benefits impoverishes the poor and which even in extreme cases has led to suicide, as a means of incentivising people to return to work. To an economist misery and suffering are good if they produce the right result. Religious mystics could never accept such an inhumane belief system, they value the individual human too highly. Inflicting suffering is never an option for them, one hungry child is never the justification for this cruel method of incentivising work. Only an economist of the Neo-Liberal persuasion could be indifferent to human pain. Economics will constantly fail as it lacks a value system that would enable it to satisfy human wants. What economics so lack as a contemporary science is a knowledge of the old.

Notes
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) Classical Greek philosopher
Jelaluddin Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) Islamic jurist, theologian and mystic
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) American economist

Why politicians would benefit from reading fairy tales

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Folk tales and fairy stories with their black and white characterisation for example the evil step mother and the virtuous, noble and abused step daughter are characterised as stories only for children. Their tales of good and evil are seen as being far too simplistic for adult reading. This is a misreading as the fairy tales we tell our children are but sanitised versions of the original folk tales. In the original story the step sisters cut off parts of their feet so as to fit their feet into the glass slipper. What is not understood is that folk tales are but attempts to explain the malevolent world in which our peasant ancestors lived. Fairies were not seen as good but as spirits that had to appeased as angering them could result in misadventure. When the Church insisted this was a good world created by God, how could the misfortune that people suffered be understood except by understanding there must be a lower level of supernatural beings who were responsible for the evil men suffered. What our peasant ancestors saw was that they lived in a world in which good and evil co-existed, not so simple but realistic.

This simple world view is in contrast to the sophisticated society of today. Rather than the simple black and white world view, it a world view of greys, varying from the darkest of greys (bad) to the palest of greys (good) and between these two there are a whole series of different shades of grey. However bad is not totally excluded, but bad only applies to those people, the psychopaths who operate outside the normal range of behaviours. When morality is seen from the perspective of the political and dominant social classes there is an incredible fluidity to moral concepts, particularly when the politeriat who govern Britain is considered. This merging of good and bad can be seen in the concept of the just war. Killing is bad except when its undertaken as part of a just war. St. Augustine defined the concept when he cited the conditions under which a soldier could kill to defend his country. Others such as Thomas Aquinas further refined this concept. While there was justice in fighting the Second World War to remove Hitler the concept becomes stretched to breaking point with the Iraq war. Our leaders invented the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and the threat they posed to the West to make the war just. One bad example does not made a moral principle bad, however the concept is open to misinterpretation or abuse, as political leaders are always tempted to give it a meaning that suits them. Government’s never fight bad wars only just wars.

Goodness takes on an incredible diversity of meanings when used by politicians. Good for them is the greater good, a good which only they understand. Only they can make the greater good a reality. The austerity programme the UK government imposed on society is for the good of all. It will like the medieval practice of bleeding purge society of ills. All very reminiscent of Stalin, who regularly sent thousands to the death camps, for the good of Russian society. Killing thousands of Ukrainian farmers led to starvation and the death of millions. Britain’s austerity programme has impoverished millions and the spread of poverty level wages has reduced demand and slowed the recovery from recession. When political leaders define good or the greater good it rapidly loses any moral content and all kind of evils can result from this. The Iraq war was intended to achieve two goods, the removal of weapons of mass destruction that threatened the West and the freeing of the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator. Instead of it being a being it good action the reverse happened. Thousands were killed in a bloody civil war consequent on the invasion and now the country is threatened with a new civil war, one against an extremist Sunni militia.

Perhaps if George Bush and Tony Blair had a sounder understanding of morality than they displayed at the time, they would not have committed themselves to the folly of the Iraq war. Politicians have long given up reading Christian moralists such as Erasmus, but if they had not, they might have come across his article entitled ‘War is sweet to those who have never tried it’. Nothing is new, ambitious princes have always through the folly of war damaged the health and welfare of their peoples.

There is a danger in our contemporary society of having leaders lacking any fixed moral reference points. If good is a flexible thing only given the meaning that the leaders and political class give it, there is nothing to stop them committing inhumane experiments of their people. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murdered millions in the name of their self proclaimed goods. On the same spectrum but at the other end our politician practice inhumane experiments on us. Austerity is perhaps the worse, although there are plenty of other examples. Children in Britain have had to endure endless experiments with their schooling experiments of varying degrees of cruelty. Education ministers impose diktat after diktat on our schools which seem destined to introduce the spirit of Gradgrind into our schools. Schools are becoming akin to Victorian factories with child labourers repeating a series of unending mundane tasks. Experimentation is not limited only to our children but also to the sick, the disabled and the young unemployed, all the major political parties seem to be engaged in a competition to produce the most inhumane policies towards these groups. When any real understanding of the good is lacking, cruel and inhumane policies will result not so much from a sense of cruelty but an inability to see people as other than things, just another resource. Possibly the bear pit that is Prime Minister’s Question Time is the best representation of the callous unfeeling nature of our politicians.

Not recognising or understanding good is only one part of the problem, the other is the failure to acknowledge the bad. Children understand that out there are bad people, be they evil fairies, step mothers, dwarves or trolls. Politicians having no conception of bad fail to recognise bad people. The evil financial wizards who managed to make billions disappear were never recognised for what they were, in fact many of them were rewarded with titles from the government. Similarly politicians never recognise the evil trolls, dwarves and queens that populate the market. There are many bad landlords who charge exorbitant rents for unfit housing, yet politicians don’t recognise that there can be bad landlords and that only government regulation can resolve this problem. When reforms of the private rental market are suggested, a chorus of ministers, politicians and journalist cry it is impossible. They claim that any regulation would make the market worse, claiming that regulation would force landlords to withdraw from the market. Conveniently ignoring that those self same landlords have borrowed vast sums to buy their rental properties and it would be suicidal not to let them. The free market for them is an unalloyed good in which their can be no bad or evil. Bad landlords are not a problem that the market can’t resolve.A child from their knowledge of fairy tales would recognise really do exist, while politicians with a moral free sensibility cannot.

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There has always been a clash between doing what is expedient in politics and what is principled. However what is unique in the present parliament is the lack of great principled individual politicians, our current parliament is a moral free zone. All the great reforms of the past have been driven by outstanding principled leaders. Lord Shaftesbury a Christian politician was the driving force behind the ending of child labour in the factories and Non-conformist Christian politicians such as Keir Hardie, Lloyd George and Aneurian Bevan were largely responsible for the creation of the welfare system, which their moral free successors are in the process of hastily dismantling.

It would be naive to claim that the politics practised in the past was much superior to today, but then unlike today there were moral giants who could drive through measures of social reform. One has to ask why is our parliament populated by a generation of moral pygmies? Perhaps an answer can be seen in the education of our predecessors. Not so much academic education as their education in values in the wider community. Wilberforce and Shaftesbury were evangelical Christians, Lloyd George and Aneurian Bevan were Non-Conformists and it was their Christian education that gave them a fierce attachment to a compassionate value system. Interestingly Lloyd George was as venal in many respects as our contemporary politicians, a womanising politician who willing sold political office; yet he was redeemed by a greater moral vision. What is lacking in contemporary society is the moral counterweight that the churches in the past provided to unbridled self interest. The great universities educate politicians in the practicalities of government, usually in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Contemporary philosophy courses teach scepticism, politics courses the art of vote winning and economics the management of society, skills needed for the second rate political Machiavelli’s. As an economist I tend to single out economics for the greatest part of the blame, it is the great leveller, a subject in which everything is reduced to a material benefit or cost, much like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knows the price of everything but is ignorant of the value of anything. Economics I believe has a tendency to shrink people’s moral vision. Particularly as current Neo-Liberal economics teaches that the economy is best left untouched by government intervention and that it is the unregulated free market that will deliver the goodies that people want, be it a home or high quality medical care.

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What is moral in a government that values the interests of the drinks industry above that of the health of the community. Successive governments be they Labour or Conservative have facilitated the expansion of the drinks industry by easing the licensing laws. Our more principled ancestors (Non-Conformist politicians) recognised the evils of too free a consumption of alcohol and introduced licensing laws. Neo-Liberal economics teaches that the greatest freedom is the freedom of the individual to consume what they please. The costs to the health service of alcohol abuse, the increase of the number of babies damaged through alcohol fetal syndrome and alcohol induced violence count as nought against the individuals right to self abuse.

The present cannot be remodelled according to the ground rules of the past societies. It is not possible to reinstate the church as a powerful institution in society and it is probably not desirable. There are too many examples from the past of the church abusing its powerful position, not least with the burning of heretics. One answer is to demote the inhuman human sciences from their dominant position in the political and public dialogue. Plato does for me provide a way forward, he said that whoever knows good desires nothing else. What he meant by this was that the study of the nature of good has the potential transforms the human personality. (Such a brief statement does not do justice to the complexity of Plato’s thought, to do it justice would require a lengthy exposition.) Only Christians take the study of good seriously, university ethics courses teach students that good is an unknowable concept and at worst an emotion. I guess contemporary philosophers would be unsuitable to the teaching of good and probably only theologians could teach it without self mockery. What I desire is a reordering of the university syllabus particularly for the great and good in the elite universities. Obviously I am not naive enough to think this teaching would modify the behaviour of the great and the good that enjoy the ‘frat boy’ life style at university, but it might produce a new Lord Shaftesbury to be a moral counter weight to the moral free sheep that populate our politics.